Search Results: "Don Armstrong"

7 November 2017

Like many laptop users, I often plug my laptop into different monitor
setups (multiple monitors at my desk, projector when presenting, etc.)
Running xrandr commands or clicking through interfaces gets tedious,
and writing scripts isn't much better.
Recently, I ran
across autorandr, which
detects attached monitors using EDID (and other settings), saves
xrandr configurations, and restores them. It can also run arbitrary
scripts when a particular configuration is loaded. I've packed it, and
it is currently waiting in NEW. If you can't wait,
the
deb is here
and
the
git repo is here.
To use it, simply install the package, and create your initial
configuration (in my case, undocked):

repeat for any additional configurations you have (or as you find new
configurations).
Autorandr has udev, systemd, and pm-utils hooks, and autorandr
--change should be run any time that new displays appear. You can
also run autorandr --change or autorandr --load workstation
manually too if you need to. You can also add your own
~/.config/autorandr/$PROFILE/postswitch script to run after a
configuration is loaded. Since I run i3, my workstation configuration
looks like this:

which fixes the dpi appropriately, sets the primary screen (possibly
not needed?), and moves the i3 workspaces about. You can also arrange
for configurations to never be run by adding a block hook in the
profile directory.
Check it out if you change your monitor configuration regularly!

20 September 2016

For the non-Debian people among my readers: The following post presents bits of the decision-taking process in the Debian project. You might find it interesting, or terribly dull and boring :-) Proceed at your own risk.
My reason for posting this entry is to get more people to read the accompanying options for my proposed General Resolution (GR), and have as full a ballot as possible.
Almost three weeks ago, I sent a mail to the debian-vote mailing list. I'm quoting it here in full:

Some weeks ago, Nicolas Dandrimont proposed a GR for declassifying
debian-private[1]. In the course of the following discussion, he
accepted[2] Don Armstrong's amendment[3], which intended to clarify the
meaning and implementation regarding the work of our delegates and the
powers of the DPL, and recognizing the historical value that could lie
within said list.
[1] https://www.debian.org/vote/2016/vote_002
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2016/07/msg00108.html
[3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2016/07/msg00078.html
In the process of the discussion, several people objected to the
amended wording, particularly to the fact that "sufficient time and
opportunity" might not be sufficiently bound and defined.
I am, as some of its initial seconders, a strong believer in Nicolas'
original proposal; repealing a GR that was never implemented in the
slightest way basically means the Debian project should stop lying,
both to itself and to the whole free software community within which
it exists, about something that would be nice but is effectively not
implementable.
While Don's proposal is a good contribution, given that in the
aforementioned GR "Further Discussion" won 134 votes against 118, I
hereby propose the following General Resolution:
=== BEGIN GR TEXT ===
Title: Acknowledge that the debian-private list will remain private.
1. The 2005 General Resolution titled "Declassification of debian-private
list archives" is repealed.
2. In keeping with paragraph 3 of the Debian Social Contract, Debian
Developers are strongly encouraged to use the debian-private mailing
list only for discussions that should not be disclosed.
=== END GR TEXT ===
Thanks for your consideration,
--
Gunnar Wolf
(with thanks to Nicolas for writing the entirety of the GR text ;-) )

Yesterday, I spoke with the Debian project secretary, who confirmed my proposal has reached enough Seconds (that is, we have reached five people wanting the vote to happen), so I could now formally do a call for votes. Thing is, there are two other proposals I feel are interesting, and should be part of the same ballot, and both address part of the reasons why the GR initially proposed by Nicolas didn't succeed:

Iain Lane's reply to Ian is not yet formally proposed, but makes it spelt out that no declassification should ever occur unless all of the involved authors have explicitly consented

So, once more (and finally!), why am I posting this?

To invite Iain to formally propose his text as an option to mine

To invite more DDs to second the available options

To publicize the ongoing discussion

I plan to do the formal call for votes by Friday 23.
[update] Kurt informed me that the discussion period started yesterday, when I received the 5th second. The minimum discussion period is two weeks, so I will be doing a call for votes at or after 2016-10-03.

24 August 2016

I'm in Pretoria, South Africa at the
H3ABioNethackathon
which is developing workflows for Illumina chip genotyping,
imputation, 16S rRNA sequencing, and population structure/association
testing. Currently, I'm working with the imputation stream and we're
using Nextflow to deploy an
IMPUTE-based
imputation workflow with Docker and
NCSA's openstack-based cloud (Nebula)
underneath.
The OpenStack command line clients (nova and cinder) seem to be
pretty usable to
automate bringing up a fleet of VMs
and the cloud-init package which is present in the images makes
configuring the images pretty simple.
Now if I just knew of a better shared object store which was supported
by Nextflow in OpenStack besides mounting an NFS share, things would
be better.
You can follow our progress in our git repo:
[https://github.com/h3abionet/chipimputation]

1 January 2016

I woke up this morning and realized that for the first time since
17 April 2001,
I am no longer a member of the Debian Technical Committee.
My departure from the committee is a consequence of the
Debian General Resolution
"limiting the term of the technical committee members" that was passed
amending the Debian Constitution nearly a year ago. As the two longest-serving
members, both over the term limit, Steve Langasek and I completed our service
yesterday.
In early March 2015, I
stepped down
from the role of chairman after serving in that role for the better part of
a decade, to help ensure a smooth transition. Don Armstrong is now serving
admirably in that role, I have the utmost respect for the remaining members
of the TC, and the process of nominating replacements for the two now-vacant
seats is already well underway.
So, for the Debian project as a whole, today is really a non-event... which
is exactly as it should be! Debian has been a part of my life since 1994,
and I sincerely hope to be able to remain involved for many years to come!

5 August 2015

I've been using qsub for a while now on the cluster here at the
IGB at UofI. qsub is a command line
program which is used to submit jobs to a scheduler to eventually be
run on one (or more) nodes of a cluster.
Unfortunately, qsub's interface is horrible. It requires that you
write a shell script for every single little thing you run, and
doesn't do simple things like providing defaults or running multiple
jobs at once with slightly different arguments. I've dealt with this
for a while using some rudimentary shell scripting, but I finally had
enough.
So instead, I wrote a wrapper around qsub called dqsub.
What used to require a complicated invocation like:

Want to run some command in every single directory which starts with
SRX? That's easy:

ls -1 SRX* dqsub --mem 8G --ppn 4 --array chdir make bar;

Want instead to behave like xargs but do the same thing?

ls -1 SRX* dqsub --mem 8G --ppn 4 --array xargs make bar -C;

Now, this wrapper isn't complete yet, but it's already more than
enough to do what I require, and has saved me quite a bit of time
already.
You can steal dqsub for yourself
Feel free to request specific features, too.

28 July 2015

Long long time ago I wanted to have Sigil, an epub editor, to appear in Debian. There was a packaging wishlist bug from back in 2010 with intermittent activities. But thanks to concerted effort, especially by Mattia Rizzolo and Don Armstrong, packaging progressed to a state that I could sponsor the upload to experimental about 4 months ago. And yesterday, after long waiting, finally Sigil passed the watchful eyes of the Debian ftp-masters and has entered Debian/experimental.
I have already updated the packaging for the latest version 0.8.7, which will be included in Debian/sid rather soon. Thanks again especially Mattia for his great work.

15 November 2014

Some of you may already be aware of the
gift tag
which has been used for a while to indicate bugs which are suitable
for new contributors to use as an entry point to working on specific
packages. Unfortunately, some of us (including me!) were unaware that
this tag even existed.
Luckily, Lucas Nussbaum clued me in to the existence of this tag, and
after a brief bike-shed-naming thread, and some
voting using pocket_devotee
we decided to name the new tag newcomer, and I have now added this tag
to the BTS documentation, and tagged all of the bugs which were user
tagged "gift" with this tag.
If you have bugs in your package which you think are ideal for new
contributors to Debian (or your package) to fix, please tag them
newcomer. If you're getting started in Debian, and working on bugs to
fix, please
search for the newcomer tag,
grab the helm, and contribute to Debian.

I'm glad to announce that Virginia King has been selected as one of
the three interns for this round of the
FOSS Outreach Program for women.
Starting December 9th, and continuing until March 9th, she'll be
working on improving the documentation of
Debian's bug tracking system.
The initial goal is to develop a Bug Triager Howto to help new
contributors to Debian jump in and help existing teams triage bugs.
We'll be getting in touch with some of the larger teams in Debian to
help make this document as useful as possible. If you're a member of a
team in Debian who would like this howto to address your specific
workflow, please drop me an e-mail, and we'll
keep you in the loop.
The secondary goals for this project are to:

Improve documentation under http://www.debian.org/Bugs

Document of bug-tags and categories

Improve upstream debbugs documentation

19 September 2014

As I wrote in my last post currently, SOAP
interface, nor Ultimate Debian Database do not provide a date when a given bug was closed (done
date). It is quite hard to calculate statistics on a bug tracker when you do not know when a bug was
closed (!!).
Done date of bug can be found in its log. The log itself can be downloaded by SOAP method
get_bug_log but the processing of it is quite complicated. The same comes to web scrapping of a
BTS's web interface. Fortunatelly the web interface gives a possibility to download a log in an mbox
format.
Below is a script that extracts the done date of a bug from its log in mbox format. It uses requests
to download the mbox and caches the result in ~/.cache/rfs_bugs, which you need to create. It performs
different checks:

8 September 2014

Unfortunately I was not able to attend debconf this year but thanks to the
awesome video team the all the talks are available for your viewing pleasure.
In order to recreate an authentic Portland experience, I took my laptop into the shower along with a vegan donut and had my children stand outside yelling excerpts from salon.com in whiny Canadianesque accents. Here are
some notes I took as I watched the talks.
Welcome Talk

Why is everyone on stage wearing shorts? Is this a thing now?

Langasek is pronounced with a 'sh' I did not know that.

Kees is pronounced 'case' I also did not know that.

Steve missed a good opportunity for a "Who moved my cheese?" joke. (Hey its
not any more obscure than the "white Chevy Nova" joke.)

A well-deserved award to Russ Allbery from some of the UK people for being
the voice of reason on the mailing lists. See Vincent Sanders blog for details.

Debian in the Dark Ages of Free software - Stefan Zacchiroli

More shorts. I am starting to feel overdressed.

Stefan reminisces about how he got involved in Free Software and
his philosophy of the same. A good introduction for anyone wondering what
makes a Debian hacker tick.

We should be concerned about software freedom in the new "cloud" environments.
Debian can play an important role in this by making it really simple for
users to set up their own cloud environments. My take: the focus should
be on free standards and protocols. The power that Google, Facebook etc.
have is drastically reduced if it is easy to jump ship.

Weapons of the Geek - Gabriella Coleman

pro: no shorts con: womens slacks

Intriguing anthropological investigation into Anonymous and how it/they relate
to Free Software.

Coc acknowledged then ignored. Why do we need it again?

"Anonymous has cabals ... [that] make the cabals within Debian look like childs play."

bugs.debian.org -- Database Ho! - Don Armstrong

I would settle for a lungi at this point but noooo shorts again. (plaid to boot.)

The return of my yearly guilt about undertaking to Don to add RSS support to
debbugs way back at debconf 10 and not following up on it. Damn it, I am going to get this done now.

Sadly, the initial part of the stream is missing and it begans right in the
middle of Don saying something interesting.

"I have to admit my primary motivation for giving a talk was to try to force
myself into actually doing the work I'm talking about."

Stats porn. The BTS is growing at a phenomenal rate. bugs opened 142/day. But only 95/day closed.

Grub Ancient and Modern - Colin and Watson

pro: no shorts con: kilt

I was interested in this talk because one of these days I want to get GRUB 2
running on Debian Minix but a lot went over my head so I'll have to do some
more research first.

One year of fedmsg in Debian - Nicolas Dandrimont

trouser status: undetermined

Problem: There are many different services providing information in Debian
but they do not interop very well.

fedmsg is a unified message bus originally developed by Fedora who were
facing a similar problem.

It has now been implemented in Debian.

Coming of Age: My Life with Debian - Christine Spang

trouser sta- oh the hell with this.

Another talk which is more biographical than technical. Again, useful to
help understand the motivations of hackers.

What interests me is that for younger generations it was open source which
was a novel idea whereas for those of who grew up in the 8-bit era, having
to hack on a computer was expected (whether you wanted to or not and it was
proprietary software you couldn't share which was considered new and strange.

Status report of the Debian Printing Team - Didier Raboud

Ou est les pantalons? Je ne sais pas. (Apologies to Mme Terzini.)

Kudos to Didier for taking up this augean task mostly on his own. Despite
the long-promised "paperless" office I need to be able to print and I was
pleasantly surprised that my new xerox all-in-one worked under Debian with
very little hassle.

Brother sucks. Don't buy their printers. Ditto for Epson and Samsung.

Buy HP instead.

2 August 2014

I routinely use a Kinesis Advantage Pro keyboard, which is a split,
ergonomic keyboard with thumb clusters that uses brown cherryMX
switches. Over the thirteen years that I've been using it, I've become
a huge fan of this style of keyboard. However, I have two major
annoyances with the Kinesis. First, while the firmware is good,
remapping the keys is complicated and producing more complicated
keyboard layouts with layers and keycodes that are not present in the
original layout is not possible. Secondly, the interconnect between
the main key wells and the controller board in the middle occasionally
fails, and requires disassembly and occasional re-tinning of the
circuit board interconnect connector.
1
About a year ago, I became aware of the ErgoDox
keyboard, which is a keyboard design which mimics the kinesis to some
degree, but with completely separated key halves (useful, because I'm
substantially bigger than the average human), programmable firmware
(so I can finally have the layers and missing keys) and with slightly
more elegant interconnects (TRRS cables). Unfortunately, at the time I
first heard about it (and other custom keyboards), making it required
sourcing circuit boards, parts, and finding someone to cut a case for
the keyboard. Then, a few months ago, I learned about
MassDrop, a company who puts together
groups of people to do buys of products at near-wholesale level
prices, and their offer of all of the parts to
build an ErgoDox. After
waiting for a group buy of the keyboard to become available, I put in
an order, and received the parts two months later.
Over a few hours yesterday, I learned how to do surface mount
soldering of the 78 diodes (one for each key), and finished assembling
and flashing the firmware. This morning, I fixed up the few key
bindings that I needed to be productive, and viola, my laptop at home
now has a brand new ergonomic keyboard.

30 May 2014

I'm working on some analyses for the
Genetic Analysis Workshop #19,
which has placed it's data on Dropbox. Unfortunately, Dropbox doesn't
allow for people to download zip archives larger than 1GB, and the
data was made available in an unpacked structure with more than a
hundred files. Some searching indicated that no one had written a
recursive downloader for Dropbox, so 30 minutes of hacking with
WWW::Mechanize
later, I wrote a
simple recursive downloader for Dropbox.
Two hours later, all of the files had downloaded.

25 February 2014

I spent the weekend at
SCALE 12x running the
Debian booth. SCALE is one of the best
conferences that I get to attend every year; it has a great mix of
commercial exhibitors and community groups, and routinely gets great
speakers. As I've done for quite some time, I organized a Debian booth
there, and talked to lots of people about Debian.
If you're in the Southern California area, or have a chance to give a
talk for SCALE 13x, you should do so! Thanks again to Matt Kraai and
Paul Hardy for helping out in the Debian booth all weekend!

12 February 2014

I'm a huge fan of Org-mode, and I keep all of
my org-mode files in git repositories which are under
myrepos control.
However, because I often make lots of changes to my agenda and notes,
I hate having to manually visit each individual project and make
changes to it.
[And it's also annoying when I forget to commit a specific change and then have to try to get my laptop and desktop back into sync.]
Luckily, myrepos can easily run a command in parallel in all of the
repositories! The following "update_org_files" command will update all
of my org-file containing repositories in parallel:

That s very Anglo-Saxon centric (6 out of 7 members). While I trust the current members and while I know that they are open-minded people, it still bothers me to see this important body with so few diversity.
Coming back to the choice at hand, Keith Packard is American and Philipp Kern is German. No new country in the mix. I can only hope that Philipp will be picked to bring some more balance in the body.

17 October 2013

I use org mode extensively, and had added
Zack's workflow for
integrating mutt with org mode
to my
~/.emacs
some time ago.
However, I've been annoyed that refiling closes the org-capture frame
before refiling finishes. The following
trivial modification
to Zack's code (which I previously modified to work with org-mode >=
0.8) waits to close the frame until you've finished refiling.

14 March 2013

While working on fixing a few encoding problems that I managed to
introduce to the BTS almost half a year ago, I took a side bit of
coding, and introduced libravatar
support to the BTS. Every e-mail now has an avatar to the right which
should correspond to the sender. Libravatar is a federated service,
which means that if you control your domain, you can serve your own
icons. It also automatically falls back to gravatar, so if you're
using that service, things should "just work". Hopefully this will be
primarily amusing, and people won't abuse it.
More importantly, but much less fun, the double encoding problems
(where mails would get double-encoded if any of the headers contained
non-us-ascii text), and mojibake wontfix icon ( ) should be fixed now.
If you see any additional cases of this, please report them to
owner@bugs.debian.org.

10 October 2012

Christian's most recent blog post
got me wondering if the decline in the bug reporting rate in Debian
was something new, or something which often happened during releases.
So, lets try to figure that out. In the BTS, when a bug report is
filed, the report is written to a file called bugnum.report, and
then not touched from then on. Let's look at the modification date on
that file to see when each bug was filed; and since we're going to
plot this, lets only look at bugs ending in 00:

Now, lets get the data into R and plot it.
[For clarity, I'm not showing the R code, but it's available in the source code for this post.]
From the plot (Bugs reported per second over time with a red loess fit
line), it looks like we do see a decline during certain periods.
However, there's an even more alarming trend of a decrease in bug
reporting in Debian which has been happening since 2006. (Note that
I've truncated the y scale significantly; there are periods in Debian
where the bug rate is astronomically high, usually corresponding to
mass bug filings; I've also limited the plot to data from 2003 on, as
I have to clean up that data significantly before I can plot it like
this.)
Not sure exactly what that means, but it is troubling.